Regional tourism dynamics in Japan: An exploratory spatial analysis

Assuming tourism as a place oriented activity, where tourism flows often cross regional borders, local and global indicators of spatial autocorrelation can be useful tools to identify and explain different patterns of regional tourism dynamics and their determinants. These techniques recently became widely used in applied economic studies, as a result of their useful insights to understand spatial phenomena and benefiting from the existence of georeferenced data and adequate software tools. This tendency is also observed in the tourism sector in the last few years, although the application of these methodologies is still scarce in tourism studies. In this work, these methodologies are applied to the case of the Japanese Prefectures, leading to the identification of different patterns of spatial heterogeneity and agglomeration processes related to regional tourism dynamics in Japan, with a view on policy and managerial recommendations. The results clearly reveal the existence of such spatial effects, reflecting the importance of central areas of Japan in terms of tourism performance. It was also possible to observe that regions where tourism plays a more prominent role in terms of its importance within regional employment do not present a relatively high performance in terms of economic growth.